Preface
The satirical opening
The Preface is brief, ironic, and aimed squarely at the Hegelian establishment. Johannes de Silentio opens by comparing the age's philosophical market to a clearance sale: everything can be had so cheaply that one wonders if anyone will bother to bid. In an age where every Privatdocent claims to have doubted everything and gone further, Johannes presents himself as a freelance writer who writes not for readers but for luxury, who has not understood the System and is not signing himself over to it. He foresees his fate: to be entirely ignored, or worse, to be cut up into paragraphs by some industrious registrar. The tone is dry and self-deprecating; the substance is a declaration that what follows will not be mediated by any philosophical shortcut. The Preface ends with a mock-humble bow: "I prostrate myself in the deepest submission before every systematic peeping-Tom: This is not the System; this has not the slightest thing to do with the System."
Exordium
Four imagined journeys to Moriah
The Exordium presents a man — never named, not Abraham, not the author — who has spent his life captivated by the story of Genesis 22 and cannot understand it. He imagines four different versions of the journey to Moriah. In the first, Abraham tells Isaac he is an idolater who is acting on his own desire, not God's command — so that Isaac will lose faith in Abraham rather than in God. In the second, Abraham is so darkened by the event that he sees joy no more, even after the ram is provided. In the third, Abraham sets out but repents on the mountain of ever having been willing to sacrifice Isaac. In the fourth, Isaac loses his faith when he sees Abraham's hand clench and a shudder pass through his body as he draws the knife. Between the versions, a recurring refrain: "No one was as great as Abraham; who is able to understand him?"
Eulogy on Abraham
The lyrical centre — praise of the father of faith
The Eulogy on Abraham is the lyrical heart of the book and the counterweight to the three analytic Problemata that follow. It opens with a meditation on what life would be without an eternal consciousness — a bottomless void — and then introduces the figure of the poet-who-loves-the-hero as the model for what Kierkegaard is doing in this book. A long sustained eulogy follows: Abraham's departure from Ur, his decades of waiting for Isaac, his receipt of the promise, his obedience to the command on Moriah. The Eulogy closes with the meditation on how Abraham believed not for a future life but for this one — that Isaac would be returned to him, in time, on earth. This believing against all expectation, this faith that holds the temporal after having given it up, is, for Kierkegaard, the definition of greatness.
Preliminary Expectoration
The two knights and the vocabulary of the absurd
The Preliminary Expectoration is the longest chapter before the Problemata and introduces the conceptual vocabulary the rest of the book will use. It opens with the distinction between the world of the spirit and the outer world: in the outer world, the one who does not work also gets bread; in the world of the spirit, only the one who works gets bread, only the one who was in anguish finds rest, only the one who draws the knife receives Isaac. It then develops the contrast between the knight of infinite resignation and the knight of faith. The knight of resignation performs an infinite movement — gives up the finite good — and lives in eternity. The knight of faith performs that same movement and then, by virtue of the absurd, receives the finite good back. Johannes confesses he can perform the first movement but not the second. A famous imaginative portrait follows: what the knight of faith might look like if you met him on the street (like a tax collector, eating Sunday dinner with appetite). The chapter closes on the impossibility of one knight of faith helping another; faith is not teachable in the ordinary way.
Problema I
Problema I — Faith or murder?
Problema I begins by establishing Hegelian ethics on its own terms: the ethical is the universal, the universal holds at every moment, and the individual's task is to annul his singularity in order to express himself in the universal. On this view, Abraham is either a murderer or he is not, and there is nothing in between. Kierkegaard does not dispute the Hegelian framework; he asks whether it is exhaustive. Is there a moment in which the individual stands in an absolute relation to the absolute, and the universal moral demand is, for that moment, set aside? The tragic heroes — Agamemnon, Jephthah, Brutus — are introduced as foils: they too sacrifice what they love, but they do so within the ethical universal, for the welfare of the community, and they can be explained. Abraham cannot be explained. His act stands in no relation to the universal; it is a purely private undertaking. The Problema closes: either there is a category for Abraham — the knight of faith, higher than the universal — or faith has never existed, and the tradition is worshipping a murderer.
Problema II
Problema II — Duty to God vs. duty to neighbor
Problema II examines the structure of duty. On the ethical account, all duty is fundamentally duty toward God — but only insofar as it is expressed in duty toward the neighbor, the family, the community. God himself, on this account, becomes an invisible, vanishing point. Kierkegaard asks whether there is, besides this mediated duty, an absolute duty toward God — a direct relation between the individual and the absolute, which can in extreme cases suspend or override the relative ethical duties. He takes up the hard saying in Luke 14:26 — "if anyone does not hate his own father and mother, he cannot be my disciple" — and refuses the exegetical escape hatch that would translate "hate" as "love less." The paradox of faith is that there is an absolute duty toward God, and that this duty — when it arises — makes the individual unable to justify himself by any vocabulary available to the universal.
Problema III
Problema III — The silence of Abraham
Problema III is the longest chapter and the most aesthetically sophisticated. Kierkegaard works through an extensive analysis of hiddenness and disclosure in aesthetics (where hiddenness can be rewarded by a timely accident), in ethics (where disclosure is always demanded — the tragic hero must himself proclaim what is to happen), and finally in the religious stage (where the hiddenness has its ground in the paradox itself and cannot be resolved by any accident or any ethical courage). He uses examples from Greek tragedy (Agamemnon and Iphigenia), from Aristotle's Poetics (anagnorisis), and from fictional domestic scenarios (lovers who conceal their feelings for each other's sake). He then turns to Abraham: Abraham's silence toward Sarah, Eliezer, and Isaac is not aesthetic hiddenness and not tragic-heroic reticence. It is the absolute hiddenness of the single individual who stands in an absolute relation to the absolute. No accident can resolve it. No aesthetic convention rewards it. Ethics condemns it. And yet it is precisely this hiddenness that makes Abraham Abraham.
Epilogue
Faith is the highest passion — and no generation gets further
The Epilogue opens with a merchant's parable: spice merchants in Holland sank cargoes to drive up the price. Kierkegaard asks whether something similar is needed in the world of spirit — whether we need to pretend we have not reached the highest, in order to have something to strive for. His answer is no: the tasks are sufficient for a human life. The properly human — passion — cannot be learned from a previous generation; every generation begins from the beginning. No one has learned to love from reading about love; no generation of faith begins anywhere but at faith's beginning. The highest passion in a human being is faith, and no generation gets further. The one who comes to faith does not stop at it — he has his life in it. But he does not get further than it either. The book closes with a brief joke about Heraclitean philosophy and a disciple who improved the master's proposition that one cannot step into the same river twice by saying one cannot step into it even once — and thereby turned a living observation into a dead Eleatic proposition. The point is that "going further" — the great project of the Hegelian age — is just this sort of improvement.